Interior Designers vs 3D Renderers & Graphic Designers

I realize a phenomenon in the interior design job market nowadays. There are a lot of people who are 3D renderers or graphic designers showing up at the interior design firms to interview the interior designer positions, and most of them got hired. Many of these 3D renderers or graphic designers were not interior design majored or licensed interior designers, but they all got very beautiful portfolios.

The software used by many 3D renderers, 3D Studio Max, can render photo realistic perspective drawings, and Adobe Illustrator, the program all graphic designers learned at colleges, can produce extremely beautiful color elevations. With the help of Adobe PhotoShop, another Adobe software learned by most graphic designers at school, can even edit the 3D renderings done by 3D Studio Max and the color elevations done by Adobe Illustrator to become even more beautiful and realistic, and when they used Adobe InDesign, another software learned by many graphic designers at schools, to create the portfolios, the beauty of the portfolios was just incomparable. No wonder those 3D renderers and graphic designers were always hired.

I personally worked with some of those 3D renderers and graphic designers at the same offices before, and when I asked them if they actually designed those projects showing on their portfolios, they all said no. They told me some other more senior interior designers (majored in interior design and licensed) at their previous jobs who came up with the designs done by hand sketches, and what they did was transforming the hand sketched ideas into the forms of 3D Studio Max and Adobe Illustrator renderings or drawings. I was wondering whether these new hired “interior designers” can come up with their own design ideas few years later after they become senior designers?! Well, time will tell.